


World's Edge

by allthingsavenger



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, Dimension Travel, M/M, Memory Loss, Temporary Amnesia, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 00:01:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5435687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthingsavenger/pseuds/allthingsavenger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve gets lost in time and Tony has to find him. Except then he starts losing his memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	World's Edge

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt:  
> Please could you write a fic where Tony travels in time, maybe to go back to change something or to find Steve after he goes back in time, with a complication which makes it harder for him to follow him, like someone has died, Or the other way around, where Steve goes back in time to find Tony, thank you!!!
> 
> PLEASE NOTE: I am no longer writing fic, but may still take prompts. Please read my bio.

He doesn’t really have a choice when Steve doesn’t come back out of the pulsating black wormhole. Perfect, serum enhanced Steve Rogers was so keen to step into it, and now he’d decided he was having so much fun in the fourth dimension that he’d neglected to drop a line back and tell them that, _hey, I won’t be back for dinner today, catch you at a later date_.

Tony isn’t furious, per se, except he’s kind of beginning to think that his best friend has just taken the lucky break he’s been waiting for to get away from Tony, once and for all, and okay so he is furious.

“I’m going to go find him,” he says to Bruce, who opens his mouth like he’s about to object, and then he closes it. _Smart thinking, homeboy_ , Tony thinks, but does not say aloud.

He puts his hand into the wormhole and feels the tug on his arm.

“Bye bye,” he says, and Bruce just gives him a long-suffering sigh.

* * *

Brooklyn looks weird. Tony feels like he should be seeing it in black and white, but here it is in full color around him. Brooklyn bridge looks shinier, without the layers of tarnish and rust that he’s become accustomed to seeing. The cars are vintage - _how quaint_ , he thinks.

The thing is, dimension jumping is a calculated risk. Or rather, it’s completely reckless and practically incalculable. Regardless, Tony can still make _some_ calculations to decrease the likelihood of ending up dead, because he’s racked up hundred of hours of research and study on the fourth dimension. It’s kind of irrelevant that he’s still barely scraped the surface.

Steve, on the other hand, has racked up next to zero hours, and is jumping through space, time and random dimensions much like how a baby labrador who’s just eaten its own weight in food might leap about in the park as you stumble after is with your arm being practically pulled off by the leash.

Tony wanders around Brooklyn for a while and then he feels the tug of the empty space-time continuum and says goodbye to 1960-something Brooklyn. 

* * *

Tony thinks he’s on Asgard, but he’s not sure because he’s can’t remember ever being there before, even though he’s sure he must’ve at some point. Everything looks oversaturated. He gets the odd feeling that Steve has visited here.

Something seems wrong in the back of his mind. He ignores it.

He watches from a balcony as Asgardian children run by in some grandly built courtyard. Their laughter peals out like music. Everywhere he looks, there are flashes of gold in his vision. He thinks Asgard looks beautiful. He also thinks Steve looks beautiful. He stops that line of thought and goes down to take a stroll in the courtyard.

A girl sits on a bench as Tony passes, a golden wreath around her temples.

“Have you seen anyone odd pass through here?” he asks her.

She laughs boldly, carefree. The sound is musical.

“Other than you? No. Are you visiting?”

Her voice is like music.

“Something like that,” Tony says.

* * *

When he arrives on Staten Island, it takes Tony almost ten minutes to realize where he is.

“Staten Island?” he says out loud, to himself, “you’re just as odd and inconsequential way back when as you are now.”

He frowns.

“Or, I mean, you’re just as odd and inconsequential now as you are way forwards in the future.”

And then, “what am I doing here, again?”

He let’s himself be pulled back into nothingness.

* * *

Steve uses his gut to tell right from wrong and is driven by emotion. Primarily, a good thing, if you ask Tony. Except emotions in the time stream are arbitrary. An influx of emotion at any time can push you into a different dimension in the fraction of an instant.

Emotion is condensed in all dimensions and times in such an arbitrary manner that, for instance, if you were aiming to land in the twenty first century but you were feeling sad at the moment you jumped, you might be spit out in the holocaust era because of the intensity of the grief surrounding that point on the timeline. Tony is ruled by more concrete things. He can solidify feelings of a time, place, setting in his mind which will let him land in the time and place he wants to be in. Which all in all, makes him more qualified for the job.

But Steve is somewhere, jumping dimensions arbitrarily, and Tony is trying to follow him. He can feel Steve’s presence in the nothingness between dimensions. He reaches out, tries to take a hold of it but it slips through his fingers like ash, or smoke, or vapour. He’s so close to Steve. He’s so far away.

So he stops thinking, let’s the time stream pull him in and spit him out again, only to snatch him back into it without warning.

* * *

_Is this Jotunheim?_ Tony wonders. He doesn’t want to move, so he sits down on the icy ground, pulls his knees up to his chin like a child. He’s shaking. It’s so cold. Steve was here, he knows that for sure. He can feel his presence like a memory just out of reach.

He can’t remember why he’s looking for Steve.

“Where are you?” he whispers, but it is pitch black all of a sudden. He breathing is shallow.

* * *

Maria Stark is dead. But Tony can see her. She is laughing. He looks around. Is that his father?

_Where am I? Am I dead?_

He sees black spots.

He sees Steve in the distance. He’s embracing someone, a young woman with kind eyes and a shock of golden hair just like Steve’s. Tony’s chest aches.

_Is that your mother?_

_Where are they?_

_Steve_ , he tries to call out, but he feels sick.

_Come back. I need you._

* * *

He glimpses himself, through a window, or a glass panel, he isn’t sure. The sight of himself, standing there how he was twenty something years ago, makes him feel sick. For a moment, he’s positive it’s a hallucination or a residual memory. And then Tony Stark starts to turn around and he let’s go of the time and falls backwards through empty space.

* * *

Tony follows Steve to Vanaheim, or at least he’s pretty sure that’s where he is from some niggling feeling in the back of his mind. He can’t put a finger on it. He’s not sure where he got that idea from, or what the word means, or where he heard it. It doesn’t seem to matter, much.

He must be too late though, because when he calls out for Steve, the only answer is the echo of his own voice in the mountainous regions. He stares out across the snow covered tree tops and shivers. There are goosebumps on his arms. Every place he visits, he gets closer.

He coughs into his hand. There is blood. Tony stares at it, bright red on his skin, too bright in the stark, washed out white of the mountains around him. He sees red as the wormhole sucks him back in.

* * *

It’s twilight and he’s in Times Square, which looks the same, but different. Dirtier. Old-school. ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ is plastered over a huge billboard. ‘Today’s Haig for Today’s taste,’ is lit up in neon. Tony snorts.

“Only today isn’t today,” he mutters.

He walks past a newspaper stand and looks at the date in the corner of the paper. 12th June, 1968. He keeps walking.

In hindsight, this was a terrible plan. More accurately, he didn’t have a plan at all. He could be stuck in some loop in the space-time continuum for all eternity. He could get lost in eons of space without any hope of returning back to his own time and dimension. He could be looking forever  without getting anywhere. Tony stops walking and racks his brain. What is he looking for again?  _Something important._ He’s seized by a moment of panic before he remembers. He’s coughing again. He’s still coughing as he gets sucked back into the wormhole.

* * *

Tony falls in love. Or, he fell in love. Or, he is in love.

In the time stream, he relives the first moment he fell in love. Was it years ago? Was it moments ago? He can’t tell, but he sees the moment, like a memory.

It was nothing special. It was Steve, asleep on the couch when Tony walked into the rec room. It was the blossoming of something warm and liquid in his chest. He relives the memory and then he forgets.

* * *

Tony knows as soon as he opens his eyes where he is. It’s a windy day, and the air screams past his ears. He also knows that he’s forgetting something. Something important. Something huge.

He feels dizzy as he looks out across a New York he’s unfamiliar with from the top of the Empire State Building. He’s freezing. His hands are shaking.

“What am I doing here?” he asks out loud in a weak voice. The observation deck is empty apart from him, so there is no answer.

_Help me._

“Tony?”

He turns around and there’s a man on the other side. There’s a pang in his chest. He aches all over. He stares into blue eyes and tries desperately to remember.

“Tony?” Blue Eyes says again.

“I’m in love with you,” Tony says, because it’s the only thing he can seem to remember, and he can already feel himself fading out of this dimension, so what does it matter anyway?

* * *

There are snatches of conversation in the time stream. Calculations drift by like smoke. His own calculations. How did he know that? He can’t remember making them.

What is he looking for? He can’t feel any presence anymore. He’s alone in the time stream. Was he looking for something? Someone? Did he overtake them in the time stream?

 _Tony_.

Is that him? Is someone coming to find him?

* * *

All around, there are clouds. He can’t see the sun, but he can feel the warmth on his back. The grassy precipice plateaus out in three directions. On the last side, there’s a straight drop into the clouds. Into nothingness. The wind tousles his hair. He looks out, across the way he must have came, but he can’t remember where he is, or how he got there.

There’s someone, half there, half not, evaporating into being right there in front of him.

“Tony?” that person says.

Is that him? He looks around. There is no one else apart from them.

“Who are you?” he asks.

The other person looks stunned.

“It’s me. Steve.”

 _Steve_.

Something flicks over in his mind, like a switch. His breathing becomes strained. Something comes back to him. Hundreds of places he visited, looking for something. He can feel the tug of something insistent, like he's about to disappear again, but Steve reaches out and takes his hand, solidifying him back into just one dimension.

Tony stands there and doesn’t do anything, because he’s too busy falling in love, for the first time and the thousandth time. He doesn’t know. He can’t remember.

He can remember the calculations, now. _After ten dimensions, you’ll start losing your memory_ , someone had said. Was it him? Was it someone else? How many dimensions did he jump through? There are equations dancing through his mind.

He remembers, for a moment. He crunches the numbers. It will take him just over a month to remember everything he’s forgotten in his own time stream.

He looks at Steve. He can relearn. He can fall in love another time. He’s already done it a hundred, a thousand time. He doesn’t know. He forgot.

“Where are we?” he hears himself ask.

“We’re at the World’s Edge.”

“Where are we going?”

“Home.”

He knows what home is. He let’s it pull to him.

“Are you coming with me?”

Steve doesn’t answer, but they’re falling together, past the edge of the world to somewhere familiar and warm.

 _Steve?_ he thinks aloud, and there's a heart beating next to his.

**Author's Note:**

> Questions about the fic:  
> Tony loses his memory and Steve doesn't because of his serum enhancements. Originally, Tony is wandering through space time looking for Steve but by the end he's overtaken him and he's randomly visiting places. The idea is that he visited hundreds/thousands of places, except he can't remember anyway, and the places in the fic are just some of the moments in his journey.  
> Also apologies to anyone living on Staten Island. I was making a reference to one of my all time favorite fics, [Average Avengers Local Chapter 7 of New York City](http://archiveofourown.org/works/312527)
> 
> PLEASE NOTE: I am no longer writing fic, but may still take prompts. Please read my bio.


End file.
